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Friday, March 20, 2015

The Sorrows of Young Werther

Once in your
lifetime, there would be a moment when everything seems smooth and feels right,
that you know you are producing something bigger than anything you have done so
far; The Sorrows of Young Werther
might have been that of Goethe! In Chinese philosophy, there is a concept
called Wu Wei, which literally means
non-action or non-doing. The Chinese believes that there will be times when we
don’t have to fight so hard to achieve something. All you have to do is to wait
for that perfect moment to come, when you don’t have to work so hard, yet
everything complies with your wish, then voila….your masterpiece! Goethe wrote Werther after being acquainted with a
young man named Jerusalem, whose faith had similarity with his own. He finished
the book in four weeks without making any preliminary plans or putting it down
on notes before. And from the result (especially the ending) I could see how
much Goethe has poured out his emotion into it. So intense and powerful was it,
that I have lost my mood to read the rest of his writings for several days.

Werther is a
young man with passionate temperament who was staying on a village. He wrote
letters to his friend William, telling him all about what he has done and how
his feeling was from day to day. These letters were woven into this epistolary
novel. Most of the letters were about Werther’s infatuation with a peasant girl
named Charlotte (he called her Lotte). They had a lot in common, and although
Lotte didn’t return his feeling but engaged and married to another man, they
became intimate friends. But Werther could not get rid of Lotte from his life;
his love for her was too strong. The last letters he wrote to William showed
how much his mental was disturbed. It affected his artistic mind too, that he
was unable to paint, or even do, anything.

Werther should be a perfect reading for
those who have interest in psychology; a bit similar with the troubled Philip
in Of Human Bondage, though Philip’s
sorrows were more complex, as the root of his problems did not come from
passionate love, but from the lack of universal love. From Werther I learned to always have control and balance over our own
life. Sometimes we need to follow our feelings, but at other time, when you do
not feel happy, there must be something wrong in what you are doing. Your
rational side must take over to make yourself balanced. The art of life is in
the balancing our two poles to drive our lives to happiness.

Looking at
the style, Goethe might be more suitable to Romanticism than Enlightenment. The
melancholy atmosphere and his flowery sentences in Werther were very romantic. However, his regard over life (and particularly
in suicides) gave him a little credit to be in the Enlightenment too, in his
reasoning against traditional values praised in the Renaissance. In fact,
Goethe was one of the proponents of the new movement called Sturm und Drang (=Storm and Drive) in
German, which succeeded The Enlightenment, and prepared for the coming of
Romanticism. Its uniqueness was in the extreme emotional expression, which you
can undoubtedly find in Werther.

Five stars
for Goethe and his almost autobiographical story of the young Werther!

“The Sorrows of Young Mike” recently published as a parody of “The Sorrows of Young Werther” by Goethe. I loved the aspects that were touched on in the updated version. John Zelazny, the writer of the parody, is in no way hiding from the original and makes this very clear. It is a marvelously done parody and takes on similar themes of class, religion and suicide. I love the way both books reflect on each other and think everyone interested in Werther should check out “The Sorrows of Young Mike.”